Comment 6 for bug 94590

My apt-get crashed also in CheckDep. See the attached gdb backtrace.

But the main problem is that the package cache handling code seems not to be very robust. There are dozens of crashes related to problems with the package cache files filed here in Launchpad. Like this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/16467

Well after some fiddling around I tried first to regenerate the package caches with "apt-get gencaches". But surprise, surprise this command did nothing on my existing package cache files. Therefore it also didn't crash. Only the workaround (delete the cache files) mentioned in bug #16467 made it possible for me to regenerate the package cache files with "apt-get gencaches" and become operational again.

No need to mention that first the update-manager applet crashed. Then I tried synaptic to see whats going on but this crashed also immediately. After that I fell back to using apt-get which also was unhappy.

What I mean is that in my opinion it is not acceptable that a core library like libapt-pkg is so crash prone and less robust according to malformed input data.

One related bug is bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/119707 which has more than two dozens of duplicates. Can anybody start fixing this damn library?